Agents of Change: IBM

Jack Loo |
Jan. 29, 2013

Singapore’s IDA unveiled its Infocomm Technology Roadmap outlining nine technology trends that will shape the future. We asked various enterprise IT heavyweights for their perspectives on the Roadmap, and next up, we have IBM.

Now, organisations can integrate and analyse massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees' sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions.

New capabilities will empower employees from every line of business, such as marketing, human resource and development to gain actionable insight into the information being generated in their social networks.

For example, the Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company's content, including email and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, allows employees from any department inside an organisation to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications, electronically sign documents, and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.

User Interface

This year's IBM 5 in 5 study of future technologies explores innovations that will underpin the next era of computing, which IBM describes as the era of cognitive systems. This new generation of machines will learn, adapt, sense and begin to experience the world as it really is. This year's predictions focus on one element of the new era, the ability of computers to mimic the human senses-in their own way, to see, smell, touch, taste and hear.

These sensing capabilities will help us become more aware, productive and help us think -but not think for us. Cognitive computing systems will help us see through complexity, keep up with the speed of information, make more informed decisions, improve our health and standard of living, enrich our lives and break down all kinds of barriers-including geographic distance, language, cost and inaccessibility.

IBM scientists around the world are collaborating on advances that will help computers make sense of the world around them. Just as the human brain relies on interacting with the world using multiple senses, by bringing combinations of these breakthroughs together, cognitive systems will bring even greater value and insights, helping us solve some of the most complicated challenges.

Imagine using your smartphone to shop for your wedding dress and being able to feel the satin or silk of the gown, or the lace on the veil, all from the surface of the screen? Or to feel the beading and weave of a blanket made by a local artisan half way around the world? Soon, industries such as retail will be transformed by the ability to "touch" a product through your mobile device.